Open Source Licenses

Open Source Licenses document Zack Rusin published at KDE web site gives a good overview of different open source licenses. Here you can find the most important details of the most commonly used open source licenses in a very compact easy to understand format.

6 Comments

Hi, im from Venezuela and i want to give you thanks about the article about PARALLEL PORT that i readed in ¨epanorama¨ , im student and it was very usefull … mm not really .. it was very fun to test… i traduced some of the article: the part abouT linux and PORTCONTROL.. and i posted it to my blog…i hope tou dont be angry..
your articles and circuits are very usefull
excuse me for my poor english,,,

Comments:
Having a solid Contributor License Agreement process in place would probably be a good idea. That way, it’s clear who owns the code that comes in and encourages people to contribute while defining a (necessary evil) process for doing so. You’ll lose random passers-by, but just one passer-by who gets litigious could be more of a headache than it’s worth.

I’m not sure if the idea of a contributor license as you suggest is in the spirit of open source.

In particular, make sure you actually own the copyrights or have a distribution license for everything you intend to open source. All it takes is one lazy cowboy coder and Google to screw your whole project. Also, understand the license you intend to distribute under, and what licenses are incompatible with it.

Or does corporate America avoid this entire opportunity/entanglement/briar patch?

Yes, to a large degree, and they’re stuck in the last century. IP has always been an imaginary government monopoly meant to enhance the business interests of a certain caste; originally that was the author/inventor, but that ship has long sailed – now it’s corporate profits almost exclusively (and you may find exceptions that prove the rule).

1. Giving the appearance of compliance
2. Refusing to provide the source to their modified bootloader, even though they made changes that introduced security vulnerabilities
3. Providing source code to a version of Linux, just not the one that they actually ship, and hoping that nobody notices
4. Dragging out GPL code requests for months on end, then inexplicably going silent